How to Use Garlic

Featured Pro: Tyler Florence
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:01


TYLER FLORENCE: Hi. I’m Tyler Florence here with a GMC Trade Secret.

Now, when it comes to cooking garlic, right, the world is your oyster. And so many cultures use garlic as the base for their cooking.

Now, I’ve got a couple of different kinds of garlic we’re going to talk about here, but one of my favorite preparations of all time has to be roasted garlic. It’s really delicious, develops a lot of natural sugars, and it’s very easy to do.

All right, so what we’re going to do first is take a piece of foil, right, and we’re going to create, like, a little pouch out of this. All right, we’re going to add roasted garlic by taking just the tops off and letting the garlic naturally roast inside its own casing, inside all the great skin, because everything has flavor. We don’t really want to lose any of that.

All right, so we’re going to take the foil. We’re going to make a little pouch out of it. It’s going to go right into the center; a little bit of extra virgin olive oil right on top, some fresh thyme. I love fresh thyme and garlic. It’s got a great flavor together, just a little bit right on top; some salt.

All right, then we’re going to take the edges and we’re going to roll it up together, make a little foil pouch so it steams and roasts all at the same time. I’ve got the oven preheated to 350 degrees. It’s going to roast for about 20 minutes until it becomes nice and fragrant. Put it right in the oven.

All right, and while that cooks, let’s talk about the other garlic here. There’s a lot to look at. I mean, have you guys seen elephant garlic lately? These things are absolutely huge. They’re really good also roasted, smashed into mashed potatoes, really nice. And there’s also powdered garlic, which is great. I like to use that on a lot of dry rubs. That’s really nice. There’s also granulated garlic, which is really good. If you can’t find fresh garlic, this absolutely does the trick in spaghetti sauce.

And when it comes to roasted garlic, when it comes out, it’s nice and soft and it really develops its natural sugar. So it’s not quite so aggressive. And you get this beautiful, almost caramely flavored roasted garlic. And what we’re going to do is rake this out, rake it into some soft butter, a little bit of parsley, and we’re going to stir the whole thing together and make a beautiful garlic butter that we are going to smear right over some toast. And it’s going to take this and dunk it straight into a bowl of pasta.

I’m Tyler Florence, and that’s my tip on garlic.